


48

by RurouniHime



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Spoilers, Bearded Steve Rogers, Birthday, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Past Relationship(s), Pining, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Post-Break Up, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Reconciliation, Shuri is here but asleep on the couch, Steve Rogers Needs a Hug, Tony Stark Needs a Hug
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-30
Updated: 2018-05-30
Packaged: 2019-05-16 00:09:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14800560
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RurouniHime/pseuds/RurouniHime
Summary: Many happy returns.





	48

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, I had to write a sad fic for Tony's bday. That's how I roll. But it has a happy ending because I love Tony and I really do wish him a happy birthday!
> 
> One additional warning in the endnotes about someone not surviving the Snapture.

“Happy birthday.”

Tony’s hands stall on the nanofiber, then press the hoodie into the table. He feels like he could keep pressing, right through the sleek surface and down, down through the floor, the earth, into darkness and quiet.

Instead, he turns. The lab is dim, lit only by the diaphanous light sources banking the table he’s working at. Shuri has long fallen asleep, burritoed in a colorful Afghan on the couch. It’s the middle of the night; the lab is empty, except for them.

And Steve, leaning in the doorway, arms crossed over his chest.

Tony grinds the other side of his brain into motion. “Is it really—” Yes, yes, it is. Forty-eight. He rubs his forehead. “Well. Shit.”

Steve ducks his head, but doesn’t say anything. Tony hadn’t noticed him before, but now he’s aware of everything: each breath out through his nose, each minute shift, the _shuff_ of his long-sleeved shirt rubbing against the jamb. He fancies he might even hear Steve blink.

Tony clears his throat. “How long have you been there?”

Steve startles, the barest hitch of his shoulders. But his eyes widen. He looks away, then lets out a huff and shakes his head at the floor. Hard to see from here; he may be smiling. “A while.”

_I like watching you work._

Thankfully, Steve doesn’t say it aloud. It hardly matters; it’s been said so many times, Tony hears it anyway.

“Yeah,” he scoffs, and goes back to his tracksuit repairs. “Red letter birthday this year.”

Steve’s smile sags, and Tony... hell, Tony can hear that, too. He’s always, always been able to sense Steve’s pain. Well. Except when his own is drowning it out. 

Steve comes further into the room, his eyes straying toward the couch. He’s so quiet when he wants to be. “I’m glad you met Shuri.”

“So am I.” Heartfelt, perhaps the first thing he’s gotten to say since the snap that felt pure, and fierce. So damned smart; she reminds him of—

Tony shuts his eyes.

Steve stops at the other end of the worktop. It’s a long worktop. No stranger to them, talking across space, one side of a lab to the other. He’s in his uniform pants and a dark, thin shirt that weaves the edges of him back into the darkness. Tony wishes he could see all of him. The full, familiar shape of him. His hair glows like spun gold, but there are so many shadows in his face.

Tony tinkers with the tracksuit until he can no longer sidestep the astonishment. “You remembered my birthday.”

“Yeah.” No sharp edges. No _of course I did._ He’s forgotten the weight of Steve’s gaze. Now that it’s resting on him again, he’s forced to acknowledge how long he went without it.

The last time they’d celebrated his birthday, Steve had backed him onto the bed wearing a shark’s grin, stripped him out of his favorite wine-red shirt and his dress pants while nosing into the crook of his throat. 

Lights bright, nothing but bare skin as far as the eye could see and fingers could stretch. Forty-six. _Happy birthday._ The last time Steve uttered those words to him was hooked, low. Smoky.

“I remember yours, too,” he says, mostly to himself.

Steve huffs again, self-deprecating. “Not hard to do that.”

“Nope.” Did he mean to harm with that? No. But it burns like acid, going down, coming up. The air between them squeezes.

He clung, until Steve’s birthday, long after he felt stupid, until one summer night it just liquefied and slid through his fingers, the smell of Steve long gone from their room, the bruises on Tony’s face and torso vanished but the ones under his eyes as potent as blood, the ache in his ribs a mere wraith in the night, fireworks shattering the sky outside, nothing of Steve _left,_ and that’s when Tony gave up.

He set fire to the bridge behind him and strode out on quick feet, tart, sharp, cross. Eventually the heat cooled; eventually he returned to Pepper, proposed to Pepper, and it wasn’t fair to her, not at all, and now Pepper’s... Now Pepper is...

He forces his hands to relax before he clenches his tracksuit to fibers. But old habits die hard, and he looks to Steve—always looked to Steve when he needed… something, validation, understanding—and the look on Steve’s _face_ is just—

“You _do not_ get to look at me like that,” he hisses. It’s automatic, another real emotion seething to the surface, fired out of the dark straight at the abrupt bubble of guilt: the way Steve’s mouth is just twisted like Tony’s hurt him on purpose, as if Tony’s even capable of causing the kind of pain that Steve already caused him.

Steve holds up both hands. Backs away. His expression smooths, but it’s not smooth, it’s a tarp thrown across a torrent. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—I’m… sorry.”

He moves to the door with his shoulders hiked back, his head bowed just enough to bare his nape to the light, the hand Tony can see in a fist at his side. Not a punching fist; fingernails digging into palm. More froths up, eating the acrimonious crust away until everything just hurts all at once, in places he’d bricked over months ago, and _oh,_ so he should have looked behind him, made sure, because that bridge never actually burned, probably never will.

_“Steve.”_

He turns, already half in the shadow of the hallway. His beard has been trimmed and his hair combed back, but it all still _ages_ him, hollows his eyes, digs around in Tony’s heart until everything soups together. “Yeah.”

Even his voice is cracked. Tony braces with both arms on the worktop, suddenly _tired,_ just tired of everything. Where is the anger? The bitter mouthful? He’s grown accustomed. But Steve should never, ever look so beaten, and nothing’s where it’s supposed to be. “Don’t leave.”

He doesn’t think about what he’s said until he sees the change steal over Steve’s face: _Still my birthday, soldier,_ mumbled into Steve’s neck in the latest hours as Steve snickered into his hair, wrestled with the doorknob to Tony’s bedroom, _don’t leave._ Smooth jawed, no beard, no mustache, the hair at his nape a velvety buzz. Months before he’d even smelled the Accords coming, when Steve still smiled. When they still smiled together. Tony’s fingers curl, and he’s surprised when he doesn’t feel the warm give of Steve’s biceps under them, the artless shrug of his shoulders as he’d wrapped both arms around Tony, hoisted him up against the wall and got to work lavishing his mouth. 

But Steve’s face is cavernous now, wrenched open. There’s no way to put anything back anymore.

“Why didn’t you?” Tony croaks. He has no idea what he’s asking. A hundred things, and unavoidably, Steve picks one. 

“You had Pepper.” There are worlds of hurt in those three words, so Tony aims worlds of hurt back.

“And you had him.”

Steve shakes his head. Keeps shaking it. “No, I didn’t. Not like that.”

God, what were they, he and Steve? What are they now? Tony sighs at the world at large, and there is so much _room_ for it now, hollow spaces where so many people once were. How long did Steve wait? As long as Tony did? 

Longer?

 _Yes,_ longer, of course, longer, and Tony’s hurrying around the worktop now, unable to stop until he wipes that wound out of Steve’s eyes.

“I’m sorry,” he begs, his hand around Steve’s wrist, then breathes it again into the side of Steve’s face, the beard silky across his lips. _We fought. It ended._ He can’t _say_ those things. They’re excuses, they’re not true, nothing ever ends between the two of them, but he was angry enough, betrayed enough to believe that it had.

“Why are you sorry?” Steve mumbles into his shoulder, curled down around him. The scent erases two years in one blunt swipe. “You were right.”

He doesn’t want to be right, not this time. “Why does it take the end of the world?” Why does it take Rhodey plunging out of the sky, Tony ripping into Steve’s oldest friend, half the people they love dying? Steve shudders and hauls him closer, until Tony’s ribs ache in that perfect, bedrock way he remembers, when he knew nothing could ever touch him. Steve presses his face into Tony’s neck and shakes.

Tony gives it to him, a moment to clench his own eyes shut. To fight, or give in. Then he lifts Steve away from him, baring wet cheeks and red eyes, and kisses him like he’s wanted to for two years. Like he never should have stopped.

“We should have been able to fight this,” he says, sneaking it between lips and teeth, tongue, breath. Not Thanos, but _them,_ what happened to _them._ “We’re better than this.” They have to be, if they ever want to defeat Thanos, and the worst part is, Tony knows they always have been; he just wouldn’t let himself see it.

“You’re better than _me,”_ Steve rasps, still broken, “you’re a far better man—”

“No.” He’s not. But he knows Steve. Steve will never agree. Steve will always love him more than he deserves, more than Steve thinks he deserves to love anyone.

“I love _you,”_ he grits into Steve’s mouth. “No matter what you do, no matter what I do. It’s never going unsaid again.”

“Tony.” It’s more a plea than his name, filled with all the loss two years can hold and more.

“Don’t.” He strokes Steve’s hair. Weaves his fingers through it because he can now. “We won’t be that ever again. You belong with me, I…”

Steve kisses him, sharp and fast, lifts him off his feet and takes his breath away. Tony winds his arms and legs around him, never going to be close enough anymore, not with the ghost of so much space between them. Steve backs through the doorway and wheels round in the blackness, slumping against the wall. Kisses Tony. Tony kisses back. For an instant, the hall is vast, as endless and staggering as the universe.

Then Tony opens his eyes, and Steve fills his sight completely. 

~fin~

**Author's Note:**

>  **WARNING:** Pepper did not survive the Snapture in this fic.
> 
> And now I have this horrible playback running through my head of Steve going day by day, country by country with this vague knowledge lurking in the back of his mind that they never technically called it quits, until he's in some-other-continent-ville seeing the news announcement of Tony Stark's engagement to Virginia Potts and the very next second just _breaking_ whatever he happens to be holding, then going over to the wall and planting his forehead against it and breaking down, fully for the first time since he carried Bucky away in CW. And maybe Nat or Sam comes in, having heard the report themselves, and just sits down quietly next to him because they didn't realize just how bright of a torch he was still carrying but they would never say 'what did you expect?' even though everyone kind of knew it, and they just let Steve fall apart for a minute because they love him and maybe they fall apart a little, too.


End file.
